Defense firm offers manycore runtime support

LONDON – ET International Inc. (ETI), spin-off from the University of Delaware in 2000 that has performed computing research for the Department of Defense, has announced that its SWift Adaptive Runtime Machine (SWARM) provides a commercial implementation of the ParalleX parallel execution model, a message-driven split-transaction computing model.

As a software partner in the Intel-led team for DARPA's Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program, ETI has applied SWARM to the UHPC initiative and has worked to bring its technology to bear on wider parallel computation needs in HPC through the ParalleX open model.

ParalleX has been in development at the University of Louisiana, amongst other places, and is addressing High Performance Computing applications. It said to have advantages for low-power, fault-tolerant, scalable manycore systems. ParalleX is designed to eliminate the primary constraints of conventional programming methods to allow application algorithm parallelism and the development of scalable applications for many-core systems, ET International (Newark, Delaware) said.

ParalleX represents a shift from a conventional message-passing computing model to an asynchronous event-driven execution model that utilizes dynamic scheduling and resource management instead of static scheduling, ETI said.

"As Intel Labs works toward the era of manycore computing, we have been excited to partner with ETI on software development to aid in our R&D efforts around HPC," said Wilfred Pinfold, director of Extreme Scale Programs at Intel Corp., in a statement issued by ETI. "ETI's SWARM technology, based on the principles of the ParalleX execution model, is an important step in moving this many-core programming technology to widespread availability and adoption at the commercial level."

"ParalleX has the potential to completely transform the way we program applications for HPC systems," said Thomas Sterling, Professor of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University and a leader of the ParalleX Research Group, in the same statement. "Today's programming execution models are not built for parallel development and as the world moves increasingly toward many-core, a shift in development approach is vital to ensure continued efficiency and improvement of advanced applications on multicore machines. ETI's SWARM technology is purpose-built for exactly this charge, and provides a tremendous opportunity to utilize the power of ParalleX with a pioneering system solution for the commercial market."

ETI provides system software for multicore and manycore computing systems that range from supercomputers to portable devices for smartphones and games.


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